Various authoring tools are widely used for creating, editing, presenting, and/or publishing content for presentation. Such content may be textual, graphical, still, moving, multimedia, interactive, etc., as well as combinations thereof. Particular authoring tools may be uniquely tailored to provide authoring functionality specifically for creating and/or editing one or more particular type or form of content. Thus, a particular authoring tool may be best suited for use depending upon the particular type or form of content.
For example, the ILLUSTRATOR® graphic editor software available from Adobe Systems Incorporated of San Jose, Calif., (the assignee of the present invention, and referred to herein as “Adobe”) provides an authoring tool uniquely tailored to facilitate creating, editing, presenting, and publishing drawings and illustrations. The PHOTOSHOP® graphic editor software available from Adobe provides an authoring tool uniquely tailored to facilitate creating, editing, presenting, and publishing photographs, films, and videos. The WAVEPAD sound editor software available from NCH Swift Pty. Ltd. of Canberra, Australia, provides an authoring tool uniquely tailored to facilitate creating, editing, presenting, and publishing sound tracks.
Often the content being created, edited, presented, and/or published is not limited to one type or form. For example, rich multimedia content, often providing a combination of video, sound, graphics, and text, has become pervasive. Accordingly, authoring tools have been developed to facilitate creating, editing, presenting, and/or publishing such multimedia content. For example, the FLASH® development software available from Adobe provides an authoring tool for creating and delivering interactive multimedia content. The FLEX™ development software also available from Adobe provides an authoring tool for creating rich Internet applications. Such multimedia content authoring tools, although providing features uniquely tailored to facilitate combining media of various types or forms into multimedia content, often do not provide a full feature set with respect to authoring content of any particular type or form.
Multimedia content authoring tools have heretofore utilized proprietary binary file formats to store individual assets (e.g., content of various types used to create the multimedia content) as a single object during authoring. For example, although perhaps originally provided as individual files, of various file formats associated with a particular type or form of content (e.g., PEG, MPEG, FLY, WMV, MP3, WAV, PNG, GIF, TXT, etc.), the authoring tool will aggregate the assets forming the multimedia content into the same binary file. Although such a binary file may follow a published standard, such as a structured storage standard (e.g., COM structured storage or OLE structured storage), the particular format of the binary file is proprietary. For example, the location of particular assets in the binary file, the order of assets in the binary file, metadata associated with the assets in the binary file, etc. is proprietary to the authoring tool.
The foregoing binary files often provide advantages in efficiently storing the content. However, these files are typically not directly accessible by software, such as other authoring tools, other than the authoring tools that created them. Not only is the binary file not compatible with other software, but the assets within the binary file are likewise not accessible to other software. Accordingly, it often is very time consuming and difficult for an author of the content to edit an asset of multimedia content created using a multimedia authoring tool. For example, assuming the author wishes to edit an asset in a way not supported by the multimedia authoring tool (e.g., to remove “red eye” from a photograph used in a multimedia presentation), the author often must load an original or native copy (e.g., JPEG file for the photograph in this example) into an authoring tool providing the desired authoring feature, make the desired edits, save the edited asset in the original or native format, and then re-import the asset into the multimedia content using the multimedia authoring tool.